Book review: How to game master like a fucking boss

When I first saw How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss by Venger Satanis I was interested in the book but somewhat put off by the title. What kind of cocky bastard gives a book a name like that? The really enthusiastic kind as it turns out.

The authors enthusiasm for Game Mastery is contagious, I got about ten pages in and decided that I would run my game on a week that I was planning to skip.

The intent of the author with this book is to present the 'Draconic Method', a system agnostic style of game mastering that has been developed over a period of three decades.

This book runs to 122 pages and consists of what I perceive as three main sections, game mastery tips, the checklist and assorted appendices.

Game mastery tips occupy roughly the first fifty pages of the book and are presented as bite sized chunks of advice, most of which are about half a page in length.

The first ten or so tips generally deal with what role playing and game mastering are, why we do them and ways to psyche oneself up to the task of running your game. As I mentioned above these serve to infuse the reader with a portion of Venger's enthusiasm for game mastery and these alone would make the book worth purchasing.

The remainder of the tips are practical in nature and pretty easy to implement in order to incrementally improve your game. Every aspect of role playing seems to receive attention, highlights for me which I'll expand on, included the authors advice on building encounters, positive affirmations and meditation. 

I always go into an encounter with a pretty good mental model of what is going on. Deliberately giving each encounter three elements and each element three aspects plus, optionally, three characteristics to each aspect is an excellent way to bring your mental model of the encounter out into the real world where your players can share it. I'm honestly surprised that I've never come across anything like this before. Revolutionary.

In my work I'm always using positive affirmations to encourage and reassure those I'm working with, and in hindsight it's surprising I never though to bring these to the gaming table.  You're sure to come across a number of tips in this book that are blindingly obvious in hindsight.

Rather than actual meditation, the author recommends spending some quiet time thinking.  This really resonated with me as I'm sure it will with many of you.  I've had insights into lots of things, not just game mastering while gardening or walking to the train station.

I did find some tips to be, perhaps, slightly odd. Despite having a matching dice set myself, I found the  recommendation to have matching dice curiously judgmental. Also, what to do about unwanted flirting seemed a bit irrelevant, but perhaps for those better looking than I it could be useful.

The tips don't seem to be presented in any particular order, for example 'unwanted flirting' is sandwiched between 'focus on one thing at a time' and 'have a backup adventure ready to go'; this has positive and negative aspects but on the whole I liked the approach as there is almost certainly something interesting on any random page even if it does make it slightly difficult to find any particular tip.

The Checklist is a list of ideas for things to include in your campaign.  It occupies roughly twenty pages, and at four or five items per page is a goldmine of game master inspiration. Not everything will be suitable for your game but most of it will be. As I was idly grazing through the checklist I pieced together an approximate solution to a campaign planning problem I've been grappling with for some time.

The appendices as I'm calling them consist of a selection of tables, a glossary for Viridian and some dungeon maps.

The tables could equally serve as inspiration while preparing your game or to fill in a blank that has arisen during play.  Those that stand out the most to me are one hundred questions to ask characters to find out a little more about them, a series of tables for creating a cult and a table of twenty unique NPCs.

The Viridian glossary allows a game master to deliver text or speech in a sinister sounding language the author has devised.  I haven't completely read this section but after a quick skim there appears to be a good selection of words that should allow wide range of phrases to be constructed.

Finally, at the very back of the book are three very different, unlabeled dungeon maps for those times when you need a bit of help coming up with the layout of that temple or thieves den or whatever. An excellent addition that the author could probably have gotten away without had he been less rigorous.

I have a digital copy of this book and it is professionally laid out in an easy to read two column format, although it could have done with more thorough proofreading. If my previous experience with DrivethruRPG is anything to go on, a physical copy should have good print and construction quality.

The cover image is gorgeous and evocative and there is plenty of art scattered through the book that will appeal to the thirteen year old boy in all of us.

The contents page actually stretches to a page and a half and unless you can remember the exact name of the section you're looking for you may have to search for a while to find just what you want.

How to game master like a fucking boss is a solid title with much to recommend it. If you run a game, you will almost certainly find a lot in this book to help you improve your game and to make you more enthusiastic about running it. I'm going to be implementing the Draconic Method in my game, I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Venger Satanis takes game mastery seriously, maybe you should too.

How to Game Master Like a Fucking Boss is available from DrivethruRPG.com 

Map making in games

Ever since I became aware of the concept of a campaign in a roleplaying game I’ve been planning campaigns. Many of these campaigns never saw the light of day but almost all of them included a campaign map. I should make clear here that when I refer to campaign maps I’m thinking of a map of the physical world or area in which the campaign takes place. If you imagine the maps that are often found at the front of fantasy books you’ll be on the right track. Discussion of other maps such as story maps or dungeon maps is set aside for another post or posts.

Usually my work on a new campaign has been sparked by an idea associated with a particular place in the campaign world such as a city, an unusual topographic formation or a biome and the campaign map has grown from that seed. Unfortunately the world outside this location has tended to be fairly generic, drawing excessively from those maps found at the front of fantasy books. Locations like Elvish tree cities, inland seas with dangerous currents and strangely circular deserts were all pretty much standard in these early campaign maps.

The kingdom of cloudhaven, this actually saw some play

I’m not going to say that these maps were ‘bad’, they were often quite pretty and always a lot of fun to make, but they were generally pretty uninspiring and not a lot of thought went into what was represented by this or that place name. My recent experience suggests that a campaign map is not the place I should start when thinking about starting a new campaign.

My second most recent attempt at a campaign map has made it quite clear to me why this should be the case. As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m about two years into running my current game and at one point I had built up an investigative adventure that took the party quite some time to work through. This left me with a bit of free planning time so I decided to create a complete campaign world (distinct from the world I'm running my game in) from scratch starting with a campaign map and working from there. I had a couple of ideas for interesting locations and a vague notion of how I wanted the land masses to be laid out.  I knew that I wanted the map to look like a map of a real place so I broke out my atlas and started looking at the maps therein (mostly Europe) to get an idea of what coastlines should look like, how big various geographic features tended to be and how far apart cities are.

As it turned out, this new campaign world lacked the spark of life I needed to invest any effort in it and I basically abandoned it after just making a few rough sketches, and turned my attention to making a map for my current campaign. What’s that I hear you ask? You didn’t have a map for your campaign?  I did not.

Location unnamed, but there is definitely a feudal kindgom

When I started the planning process for my campaign I had been reading a lot of Joe Abercrombie, specifically the First Law trilogy (I thoroughly recommend these books), which did not feature a map at the start of the book. I did a little reading around and discovered that Mr. Abercrombie had deliberately not included a map as he was sure that fans would analyse it in minute detail and find that it wasn’t quite consistent with the text of the book. That characters had traveled from place to place too slowly or too quickly, that there shouldn’t be a forest there because there is a mountain range there and so on.

This made me realize two things. One, a poorly conceived map would constrain any stories I was attempting to tell in the future. Two, the action I had planned took place in a newly discovered continent quite far away from the area the player characters were from. So instead of drawing a campaign map I described the locations that the player characters needed to know about and left it at that.

This approach worked really well up to a point, and one of the players (whose character is a cartographer) drew a pretty nice map of an area they were adventuring in that I later extended into a new area.

However after the player characters had been wandering around for a while those descriptions had become a bit complicated and were scattered across half a dozen files in my campaign folder. I found it necessary to draw a rough map that allowed me to easily tell where places were in relation to each other, and once I had done that I really wanted to make a nice looking map that we could lay on the gaming table and draw on and add notes to. I found some map drawing tips on various blogs, went back to my atlas to refresh myself on what coastlines look like and started drawing. Most importantly though, those areas that were empty, I left empty. This will let me add locations that help build the story rather than constrain it.

In the words of LaTorra and Koebel ‘Draw maps, leave blanks’.

The Midland Confederation, watch out for corsairs along the friendly coast

From the beginning

Here it is, my first post.  My plan is to write about things related to my experience with RPGs and it seems that in order to build some context, the place to start, is the beginning.

At high school one of my group of friends obtained from somewhere the classic red box of dungeons and dragons.  Lunch time was never the same again.
A few dungeons were crawled, usually prefaced with a riveting tale of how the party had randomly turned up at cliff face and noticed a cave entrance.  The only sensible thing to do was to enter the cave and slay whatever we found within.

We rotated the role of dungeon master and drew maps and mazes that were populated with improbable collections of monsters we didn't worry about things like story, or anything that might exist outside the dungeon.

At some point, still in high school, we got hold of AD&D 2nd edition.  This seems to have coincided with the first of our extended campaigns.  Finally the party had an objective beyond 'slay everything'.  Within the game we traveled through a fantastic realm while in the meta-game we wondered what possible use the bard could be.  This was a golden age in terms of the amount of time and energy we could invest in the game, we had a solid group, we collected vast numbers of game supplements, some of the cool kids at the school became interested in what we were doing.

Moving from high school to university roughly coincided with the release of D&D 3rd edition.  What a revelation 3rd edition was, no more THAC0, saving throws that seemed like they might be possible to make, books that didn't smell slightly weird.
We lost some players, but gained some to offset the loss.  I joined the university roleplaying club and was exposed to some new stuff, Rifts, Vampire: the masquerade, the awkwardness that is LARPing.
We were perilously close to two stores that specialised in RPG stuff, so I accumulated a wide selection of game systems, GURPS, Champions, Earthdawn, Brave new world, Terminus V.  I was particularly interested in those games that dealt with a modern setting or with super heroes.
Then D&D 3.5 was released and I wanted nothing to do with it having just purchased the 3rd edition rules.
During my time at university we usually had a campaign running but they would always end abruptly, usually interrupted by exams and never resumed afterwards.  I ran games in a few systems, some of those listed above, plus a couple that I concocted myself.  These games were always either intentionally short run or ran out of steam after half a dozen sessions.

Post university the members of our group dispersed for work and further study and gaming fell by the wayside to some extent although there were sporadic efforts to get a game running, sometimes with just two of us, sometimes with more.  After a few years though there were enough of us in one place to muster a regular game a long running campaign using a hybrid of 3rd edition and 3.5 (primarily dependent upon which books a particular player had).  As this game went on additional players joined the group making things more complicated for the dungeon master, and we attained the lofty heights of the mid-levels, complicating things further still.

In an attempt to rein in this explosion of complexity we switched to the recently released 4th edition of D&D and combat suddenly took three hours to resolve. Gradually we figured our freshly rebuilt characters out and things resumed a reasonable pace.  For a variety of reasons this campaign came to an end and was replaced with another also in 4th edition, this campaign reached that point where so many go astray, the planes, and fizzled out about two years ago.

During this time I decided that 4th edition was too much like playing RPG video games (which I've never been a fan of) and discovered Pathfinder.  Described to me by a friend as D&D 3.75, Pathfinder promised to hearken back to the good old days of 3rd edition with most of the kinks ironed out.  Having recently read a book about the era of European colonisation I had a great idea for a campaign that would deal with the moral quandaries of making money off the exploitation of native peoples.  I wrote an initial adventure to get the ball rolling, it would end with a decision point, the party could side with the company or the natives. Things went spectacularly well, but in a totally different direction.
I find myself now, two years later, faced with a party of eight plus an animal companion and and eidolon, trying to find that balance of story telling and dice rolling that keeps everyone interested.

A longer story than I might have anticipated, but hopefully there's a lot still to be written.